Two Fingers
Pam Clements | Nonfiction, Summer 2025
Always, two fingers held straight, cigarette clasped between them. The remaining fingers and thumb circled a glass with her half-finished Manhattan. More often than not, the cigarette sported an ash that grew longer as the conversation went on, until it finally fell, unnoticed, onto the carpet. Her fingers were long and slim, unlike her daughters’, whose digits reflect our father’s stubby hands. Her nails were always neatly cut, though never polished. The Manhattan, in a clear cocktail glass, glowed bronze, clinking with ice. At the bottom settled a precise, round maraschino cherry, red with a dye not yet recognized as poisonous.
With this hand my mother would gesture, as she pontificated about this or that: the civil rights protests, which pianist played the best Chopin, what each of us kids should be doing with our schooling and our still far-off adult lives. Her chair sat across from my father’s, her talking, him mainly listening. Something soothing would be playing on the Magnavox—Satie’s Gymnopedies, Air on a G-String, Adagio for a Dead Princess.
We knew this scene well, because it was repeated every night. We three sisters shared a bedroom which lay directly above the living room, and there was an old air register right in the middle of the floor. Many nights, especially if there was a conversation that we wanted to hear, we would open the heavy metal slats by pulling on a lever that made a distinctive clanking noise. Our parents’voices would raise and lower depending on how much they wanted us to overhear. We could peer down through the register and see that hand clasping cigarette and drink, pointing, raising and lowering with the passion of the moment.
Eventually, we would all be lying on the floor, three young heads pressed against the open register, waiting to hear what news the oracle would bring us this late night. And late it was, for the Manhattans never appeared until the eleven o’clock news was over (I was in college before I realized anybody drank alcohol before eleven p.m.)
Those Manhattans, the cigarette ash, the talk of art and war, the music, the late-stopping-in of friends—to me, that hand around the Manhattan signified sophistication, bohemian insouciance, the ultimate in adulthood, a frisson of difference from our ordinary suburban lives. More than once, I heard my mother say to a visitor, when about two inches of ash went down on the carpet, as she rubbed it in with her toe: “It’s good for the moths.”
That hand gripping the glass a little too tightly, the cigarette ash forgotten in the heat of an argument, that ice tinkling enticingly over the maraschino cherries—that was the Dorothy Parker world my mother wanted to inhabit all the time, not her daily life of teaching seventh-graders how to read, marshalling three recalcitrant daughters into life through the kind of bland existence I came to know she hated, trying to make ends meet on a couple of pre-Union teachers’ salaries, trying ever to resist, resist pallid conformity.
That pointed gesture was resistance, transmitted to us, but ultimately, it was hers.
________________________________________________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This piece encapsulates the contradictions of my early home life. We lived at the intersection of the hearty Midwest and the sophisticated East Coast; my parents were both ordinary as could be and completely eccentric (ask me about the time I came home from college to find both 100 yards of spelunking rope and a spinning wheel in the living room, both unremarked upon). My mother was in some ways, an everyday suburban housewife, though we lived in an old farmhouse, yet she yearned for more significance, if not for herself, for us, her daughters. This trace fossil shows up regularly in the way I conduct my life, decades past those living room scenes.”
Pam Clements lives in Albany, New York. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in literary magazines including Kalliope, The Palo Alto Review, The Plenitudes, and The Baltimore Review. She has published one volume of poetry, Earth Science (The Troy Book Makers, 2013), and has completed a memoir about the years she spent teaching in Charleston, South Carolina.
Two Fingers
Pam Clements | Nonfiction, 2025
Always, two fingers held straight, cigarette clasped between them. The remaining fingers and thumb circled a glass with her half-finished Manhattan. More often than not, the cigarette sported an ash that grew longer as the conversation went on, until it finally fell, unnoticed, onto the carpet. Her fingers were long and slim, unlike her daughters’, whose digits reflect our father’s stubby hands. Her nails were always neatly cut, though never polished. The Manhattan, in a clear cocktail glass, glowed bronze, clinking with ice. At the bottom settled a precise, round maraschino cherry, red with a dye not yet recognized as poisonous.
With this hand my mother would gesture, as she pontificated about this or that: the civil rights protests, which pianist played the best Chopin, what each of us kids should be doing with our schooling and our still far-off adult lives. Her chair sat across from my father’s, her talking, him mainly listening. Something soothing would be playing on the Magnavox—Satie’s Gymnopedies, Air on a G-String, Adagio for a Dead Princess.
We knew this scene well, because it was repeated every night. We three sisters shared a bedroom which lay directly above the living room, and there was an old air register right in the middle of the floor. Many nights, especially if there was a conversation that we wanted to hear, we would open the heavy metal slats by pulling on a lever that made a distinctive clanking noise. Our parents’voices would raise and lower depending on how much they wanted us to overhear. We could peer down through the register and see that hand clasping cigarette and drink, pointing, raising and lowering with the passion of the moment.
Eventually, we would all be lying on the floor, three young heads pressed against the open register, waiting to hear what news the oracle would bring us this late night. And late it was, for the Manhattans never appeared until the eleven o’clock news was over (I was in college before I realized anybody drank alcohol before eleven p.m.)
Those Manhattans, the cigarette ash, the talk of art and war, the music, the late-stopping-in of friends—to me, that hand around the Manhattan signified sophistication, bohemian insouciance, the ultimate in adulthood, a frisson of difference from our ordinary suburban lives. More than once, I heard my mother say to a visitor, when about two inches of ash went down on the carpet, as she rubbed it in with her toe: “It’s good for the moths.”
That hand gripping the glass a little too tightly, the cigarette ash forgotten in the heat of an argument, that ice tinkling enticingly over the maraschino cherries—that was the Dorothy Parker world my mother wanted to inhabit all the time, not her daily life of teaching seventh-graders how to read, marshalling three recalcitrant daughters into life through the kind of bland existence I came to know she hated, trying to make ends meet on a couple of pre-Union teachers’ salaries, trying ever to resist, resist pallid conformity.
That pointed gesture was resistance, transmitted to us, but ultimately, it was hers.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This piece encapsulates the contradictions of my early home life. We lived at the intersection of the hearty Midwest and the sophisticated East Coast; my parents were both ordinary as could be and completely eccentric (ask me about the time I came home from college to find both 100 yards of spelunking rope and a spinning wheel in the living room, both unremarked upon). My mother was in some ways, an everyday suburban housewife, though we lived in an old farmhouse, yet she yearned for more significance, if not for herself, for us, her daughters. This trace fossil shows up regularly in the way I conduct my life, decades past those living room scenes.”
Pam Clements lives in Albany, New York. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in literary magazines including Kalliope, The Palo Alto Review, The Plenitudes, and The Baltimore Review. She has published one volume of poetry, Earth Science (The Troy Book Makers, 2013), and has completed a memoir about the years she spent teaching in Charleston, South Carolina.